Smithsonian to Open London Exhibition Space With Victoria and Albert Museum

LONDON — For the first time in its 170-year history, the Smithsonian Institution will establish a permanent presence outside the United States. The Washington-based Smithsonian and the Victoria and Albert Museum in the British capital announced on Monday that they would collaborate on a new exhibition space in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in East London, the site of the 2012 Games.

A new branch of the Victoria and Albert Museum will share space with the Smithsonian outpost — alongside a cluster of other institutions, including Sadler’s Wells Theater, University College London and the London College of Fashion — in a major cultural complex called Olympicopolis, due to open in 2021.

In January 2015, the Smithsonian had announced that it was considering opening a 40,000-square-foot, or roughly 3,700-square-meter, exhibition space in the park. It had been reported that the London authorities promised to contribute an estimated $50 million to support construction and the shipping of exhibits for an independent Smithsonian building. Instead, the American institution will run “a jointly organized permanent gallery space,” according to press materials, with the new Victoria and Albert branch, which will be called V&A East.

Is the contribution from the city of London still on the table? In a telephone interview, Albert G. Horvath, the Smithsonian’s under secretary for finance and administration, sounded vague. “The support of the former mayor, Boris Johnson, was tremendous,” he said, “and we are feeling the same support from the new mayor, Sadiq Khan.”

In a joint news release, the institutions said the Smithsonian exhibitions and programs in London would be supported by contributions “from the private sector, with the help of Foundation for FutureLondon, a new charity established for Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.”

Tim Reeve, deputy director and chief operating officer of the Victoria and Albert, said the museum had been eager to work closely with the Smithsonian ever since it heard about the institution’s interest in Olympicopolis, a 4.5-acre waterside site close to the Olympic Stadium.

“It’s a great institution, enormous, with an incredible collection that is complementary to ours,” he said, referring to the Smithsonian. “It seemed obvious to us from early on that some of the subjects we were keen to investigate would be better done together.”

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The Smithsonian “started to move away from the idea of a real estate transaction and to the idea of a collaborative project,” Mr. Horvath said.

“The amount of annual operating overhead cast a big shadow over the primary objective: How do we get broader exposure for the Smithsonian internationally?” he said. “But one of the main attractions early on was to be connected to a number of other cultural institutions.”

Referring to the Victoria and Albert, Mr. Horvath added: “It was astounding to us how similar our visions for the future are. We are both thinking about what a 21st-century museum should do, presenting content differently through digital media and technology, engaging audiences who might not be inspired to visit our institutions. To us, it seemed like a marriage made in heaven, and as time went on, we began to feel that it would be preferable to collaborate.”

Mr. Reeve said that the two organizations had “lots of ideas” about possible exhibitions that would be planned over the next year. While there was no decision on how the roughly 195,000-square-foot building would be divided up, he said, the Smithsonian would have significant space.